Troutsmith (13 page)

He knew that giants are best hunted at night. Most of us have fished at night. A late mayfly hatch may keep us on the stream until midnight or a bit later. Hot summer weather may find us casting in the predawn hours. Richard Walker's night fishing involved getting to Redmire before sunset and fishing all night until 9 or 10 a.m. the following day. Imagine putting in a full workweek, then fishing all night Friday and again on Saturday, and still getting up and off to work on Monday morning, with family obligations thrown in somewhere, doing this week after week and ultimately month after month. No wonder Walker looked a bit haggard by September.

Nevertheless, on the night of September 12, 1952, Walker and his usual fishing companion Peter Thomas cast their baits into the water at Redmire Pool, put the Mark IVs in the rod holders, set the bite alarms, and settled down to wait out another long night. It was cold in the darkness. Just after 2 a.m. the sky clouded over, threatening rain. Walker said later that he never remembered being out on a blacker night. The wind died down, and off in the shadows Redmire Pool was becalmed and absolutely quiet. Walker and Thomas dozed. Around 4:45 a.m. one of the bite alarms went off.

Thomas got to the rods first and, turning to Walker, said simply, “It's yours.” Walker put the back of his right hand against the line where it spooled off the reel. The hairs on his hand prickled as the line passed over them. Something had taken the bait and was moving steadily away, out into the deep end of Redmire Pool. Slowly, with a deftness borne of long experience, Walker lifted the Mark IV from its holder. The bail of the spinning reel clicked solidly as it engaged. He stood motionless in the dark, rod in hand, waiting, waiting until the line was almost tight. Then he struck with all his strength, a wide, sweeping stroke that ended with the rod up high above his head. The progressive action of the Mark IV hooked the fish without breaking the line, and battle was joined.

Walker said that hooking the fish was like hooking a sandbag. For a sandbag it fought pretty well. The turning point came when the lunker decided to try to hide in a weed-choked tangle of chestnut roots near the dam. Somehow the fish had to be stopped. Walker described the action in his classic
Still-Water Angling
: “I increased pressure. At first it had no effect; then as I bent the rod more, the efforts of the fish became intensified. I knew only a few yards separated it from disaster, and hung on grimly. The rod bent as never before—I could feel the curve under the corks in my hand; but everything held for the two or three minutes that the fish continued to fight his way towards his refuge. Then, suddenly, he gave it up.”

The fight continued, but the outcome seemed no longer in doubt. Then, just as Peter Thomas was about to net the huge fish, it ran straight into a submerged clump of brambles. Undeterred, Thomas reached into the brambles, put his hand around the fish's head, turned it around, and guided it back out through the tunnel of thorns into the waiting net. There was just one more problem: Thomas couldn't lift the fish out of the water. Walker set down his rod and waded out to help his friend. He grabbed one side of the net frame, and together the two men hauled the fish out and struggled fifty yards away from the lake over ground mined with tussocks. Then they put down the net and started breathing again. The fish was a giant common carp,
Cyprinus carpio
, the largest they had ever seen, and the largest anyone had ever caught with a rod in England at that time.

All summer Richard Walker had thought about what he would do if he caught a record fish. Now that he'd done it, he simply couldn't kill it. The two anglers kept the carp alive in a keep-sack until they could make a telephone call to the director of the aquarium at the London Zoo. Walker and Thomas were able to weigh the carp on a certified scale before gently carrying the fish to a display tank. Forty-four pounds exactly, and a very popular fish while it lived out the rest of its days on public display in Regent's Park.

Still-Water Angling
was published by MacGibbon & Kee the following year and has become a classic. Richard Walker became a truly legendary angler throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, and remains so today long after his death. His Mark IV rod has become an icon among anglers who specialize in fishing for cyprinids like carp, barbel, tench, and bronze bream. Everybody on that side of the Atlantic wants to buy one or build one, just as every pilot dreams of flying a Spitfire.

Not in the United States, however. Most anglers I talk to are unaware of how popular carp are across the Atlantic, and incredulous that a fisherman like Richard Walker could be lionized for catching a carp, no matter how big the “danged scale-fish” was. “What? A trash fish?? I shoot 'em with my bow!” is a common response. How anglers relate to fish like carp provides deep insight into the complicated love-hate relationship that we have with species that are invasive and nonnative where we live.

Teresa and I are no different from anybody else in this respect. Our home in the Baraboo Hills of Wisconsin displays the whole thing in microcosm. Our property is perched on top of a divide between the Wisconsin River and Baraboo River watersheds. On either side of the ridge are two very different aquatic and riparian worlds.

Prentice Creek begins just west of our land and falls east through the narrow defile of Durwards Glen, eventually losing itself in the Wisconsin River. Prentice Creek is two or three feet wide in most places and is barely fishable at all, but it holds a tenuous population of wild, native brook trout, a true ice-age relict population of
Salvelinus fontinalis
. These fish are tiny, incredibly precious, 100 percent native brook trout that few people know about. Prentice Creek also hosts small but persistent populations of native ruffed grouse and American woodcock that live and breed on its banks in company with a suite of native plants.

To the north, Rowley Creek picks up all the seepages and springs of a much larger valley and flows west into the Baraboo River. Rowley Creek originally wasn't a trout stream at all. Sometime during the 1930s a company prospecting for iron ore drilled a system of boreholes along the spine of the Baraboo Hills south of the creek. No iron was found but groundwater flooded the boreholes, which became artesian wells. The influx of clear, cold spring water was so great that it altered the thermal regimen of Rowley Creek to the point where the stream could support trout. Within several years the State of Wisconsin began stocking domestic, hatchery strains of brook trout and nonnative brown trout in Rowley Creek, and the rest is history. These domestic-strain trout reproduce naturally and very successfully today, and I see people fishing on Rowley Creek about four days a week during the trout season. Nonnative watercress is common in Rowley Creek and doesn't seem out of place in a riparian plant community that is mostly European. The native sharptailed grouse that were plentiful in the Baraboo River valley as recently as the 1920s have been replaced by nonnative Asian ring-necked pheasants.

Even innocent people are a delicious irony when viewed through this lens. The most invasive, nonnative, habitat-altering, weed-spreading species in Wisconsin is people like me, nonnatives who have come to Wisconsin over the past two centuries. Teresa has a Native American woman on her recent family tree, but I guess I'm a Polarian: a hodgepodge of genes from fishing Poles and fishing Hungarians mix-mastered together and born in the USA with a little silver fishing rod in my hand. I'm the enemy, and there are more and more like me every year. But take my advice and don't ever bring up the issue of human overpopulation in a room full of conservationists. Heck, don't bring it up at all, anywhere; as one writer put it, “We need to make sure that elephants standing in rooms don't become endangered.”

People have strong biases in favor of some fish and some methods of fishing, and I've always been curious about why that is. I think it comes down to four factors: the intrinsic qualities of the fish (including whether they're native or introduced), the aesthetic qualities of the fishing method, the setting where fishing takes place, and the socioeconomic class of the angler.

The first “big” fish I ever caught was a carp from Pennsylvania's Delaware River. It weighed just 3½ pounds, but I was six years old and it was far and away the biggest fish I'd ever seen. At that age I didn't know there were “trash” fish, and it never entered my head that such a big, beautiful, hard-fighting fish had no value in the eyes of anyone present except me. Because it was my first big fish, because I caught it at a very impressionable age, and because I caught it from a beautiful pool near the towering cliffs of the Delaware Water Gap in the presence of witnesses including my father, grandfather, and several uncles, carp have always occupied a special place in my heart.

Judged strictly by appearance, a big carp with its bronze scales and red fins is a truly beautiful fish. Compared with a salmon or a trout, somebody asks? Yes; a big, healthy carp is far more beautiful than a dark, rotting Pacific salmon finning weakly in the lukewarm water of the Milwaukee River or a Lake Michigan brown trout covered in fungus. But the carp is an invasive, nonnative species, and today my default position is that I'm opposed to moving any species of plant or animal to places where that species isn't, or wasn't, naturally occurring in recent geologic time. This is a complicated, inconsistent, and hypocritical position for me though. I can condemn the carp, but I can't bring myself to condemn the ring-necked pheasant or the brown trout.

Fly fishing is a very active way to fish, and many people find the graceful dance of fly casting to be more satisfying than any other fishing method. Fly fishing is also great fun for people who like to walk. Personally I much prefer to use the fly rod in situations where the fish that I'm after are concentrated in a relatively small area, in shallow water, and in water that's clear enough to see the fish take the fly. But for covering a large area of water for fish that are spread out, I'll use a spinning or casting rod every time. Part of the decision depends on how the rotator cuff in my right shoulder is feeling on a given day. My body's kind of like an old car with high mileage, and I have to pick and choose my fishing times, places, and methods so that I'm having fun. For me, fishing in pain is not fun.

I think that the quality of the setting where fishing takes place is the single most important factor that determines fishing enjoyment. This is where carp start to lose serious ground among American anglers. Species like trout and grayling are not only beautiful to look at; they are uncompromising about where they live. Brook trout are like canaries in old-time coal mines. Their presence indicates that the stream's water quality is excellent. Cutthroat trout are the Lewis and Clark fish, living symbols of the last unspoiled wilderness areas in the American West. By contrast, carp are often the last fish to die off in polluted, degraded bodies of water surrounded by human development. But where carp are the only fish left, or where carp live at peace with other fish in clear, unpolluted water, they are fun to catch and fun to fish for.

This brings us at last to the dark side of fishing; the effect of socioeconomic class on how we view the activity. Class structure is much more apparent, and openly acknowledged, in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States, but how we view our world, including fishing, has a lot to do with socioeconomic class no matter where we live. One of the reasons I still enjoy carp fishing today is that by engaging in it I'm defying and rebelling against some biases I was taught when I was a kid. It's fun being a rebel and striking a blow for social equality in my own small way. And if by fishing for carp I honor the memory of a truly great angler like the late Richard Walker, then I am proud to do so.

A freestone stream was the first trout water that sang to me, and the music of clear, cold water rushing around mossy boulders and tumbling over ledge rock has haunted my thoughts ever since. Bieber Creek caromed down a narrow fold in the misty blue ridges of Pennsylvania, where my aunt and uncle owned the Empathy Gardens resort. Empathy Gardens made its name as a group of secluded cabins in the cool, forested uplands of Berks County. Most of its guests were people from Philadelphia who were trying to escape the heat of the city during their summer vacations. Sometimes my family would stop at Empathy Gardens during trips to visit relatives “back east.” On just such a day when I was five years old, my dad lifted me up so that I could see over the parapet of a fieldstone bridge and down into the dark, slightly tea-colored water swirling below. At first I saw nothing but wet rocks, noisy, foaming water, and long lines of bubbles. But with Dad's patient help I finally made out the narrow, wavering shadows of fish holding just in front of the largest rock like dolphins running ahead of a cruise ship, except in this case the water was moving and the “ship” was stationary. We watched the trout for some time as they shimmied back and forth in the current, darting about in search of food and maintaining a pecking order that kept the largest fish in the best position. Little did I realize the powerful spell that those trout cast upon me on that long ago July afternoon. Or perhaps it was the raw force of the loud, rushing water or the sense of mystery in the deep-shaded forest of yellow birch and hemlock that surrounded it, or maybe all these things burned such a deep impression in my young mind that even now, after more than four decades, the experience is as clear in my memory as if it happened this morning. I can still hear the roar of the cascades, and I can smell the drift of pine needles beneath the trees and the musty dampness of the stones along the bank even as I write. Sometimes I wonder if Dad understood the risk of introducing me to those things.

Many years passed before I learned to fly fish, but the fishing passion never died even though we lived in the suburbs of Chicago and my fishing opportunities were limited to a couple of small, sadly degraded ponds and lakes that were within biking distance of our home. I settled for carp, goldfish, bullheads, and a few largemouth bass and panfish because they were the only game in town. A cane pole was the first fishing outfit that I bought with my own money, but sometimes I'd borrow one of Dad's spinning outfits even though he wasn't very pleased about it. All of my fishing at this time was done with live bait: earthworms large and small, and sometimes grasshoppers later in the summer.